so i bought an ECS geforce 6200 video card some months ago (thanks google) and everything was going fine except for the last few days when i noticed something strange. I was playing some old game and i noticed some slow down which is odd because it had never happened before and i am pretty picky with that sort of thing. Since i sensed something wrong i checked the GPU temperature with GPU-Z and it was over 69 Cº! it was the highest that i had ever seen. The card doesn't have a fan only a disperser or whatever that thing is called, here in chile is summer so that probably adds a couple of degrees to the overall hotness. I have read conflicting reports on the internet about the maximum temperature this card should get so i am asking at what temp should i be worried? Any thoughts?

I actually saw that thread before making this thread, i just wanted to get a second opinion. I guess that means the slowdown is coming from somewhere else...maybe i need to defrag my hard drive and do other maintenance tasks. Anyway thanks for the help.

some motherboards are configured to slow down the processor if they get too hot.

Yeah i just checked the bios, i saw nothing like that in there. I defragmented the hard drive where my games are installed and i saw a slight drop in the slowdowns i get. I will probably format the C: disk and install Windows XP again. If the slowdowns persist then that means it's a hardware problems and i will be screwed. Hopefully it's just a Windows problem.

I have a variety of BFG GeForce 7300GTOC cards and they are regularly that sort of temperature (even with a fan). Doesn't seem to cause a problem though.

Biggest problem I have is that the fans a very noisy and replacing them means sending the cards back to BFG as they won't supply replacements and they carry a lifetime warranty which would be invalidated if I use an alternative fan assembly. Shame they can't install better quality fans!

I had a GEForce 6200 and it drove me nuts with overheating problems, causing crashes whenever I used anything graphics intensive (which for some reason also included scrolling a web page with Firefox 2 ). It took me a while to figure out it was an overheating problem - the fix I used was crude but 100% effective - I attached a tiny fan blowing into the heatsink using a piece of string.

Can't recall the exact temperatures it was hitting but it was way over 69C IIRC, so your problem could very likely be something else.

So today i remembered that one of the first things i did when i got the card was to run it trough GPU-Z. GPU-Z allows you to send your results into an online database so i though i'll check my old results VS the one i get now.

Notice something different? let me give you a hint: The damn memory clock is overclocked by 100% no wonder i had slowdowns since my little card can't take such speeds, i got lucky that my card didn't fried or something. I have no idea how the overclock happened since i don't even know how to overclock so how do i set the memory clock back to how it was before? Any software i can use? this sucks :/

Edit: I downloaded and installed RivaTuner and used this guide in order to drop the memory clock by 5 MHZ using the driver mode. I was going to drop it to 266 MHZ at once but i didn't know if that was prudent so should i drop the memory clock in 5MHZ each time or should i drop it all at once? never done this kinda of thing before.

I actually installed Ntune. It looked just like the nvidia control panel that i already had, i couldn't find the overclocking options so i went back to Rivatuner. Using RivaTuner i was finally able to drop the memory clock to 270 MHZ. Unfortunately RivaTuner couldn't make the changes permanent which is what i wanted, it had to install a little startup entry in order to set the memory clock every time Windows booted. It sucks but it's the best i can do for now.I will probably have to mess with the video card bios so i don't have to use Rivatuner anymore, i will probably do it later tough.

I know there are tools that can actually write their settings into the video card BIOS. Thought that Ntune or indeed RivaTuner could do such a thing.

Sorry, my bad.

Personally speaking, my head is totally not into overclocking. If I require the speed for anything in my PC I will get the components that can deliver by default. In general I carry the opinion that when you start overclocking, you deserve every trouble you get.

So i though i'll give you guys a little update on what happened. finally i decided to simply reformat and install Windows again, not a subtle solution but hey it works most of the time. Instead of installing the newest drivers available for my video card i choosed to go with the ones that came on the CD.A quick run of GPU-Z confirmed that i made the right choice since the memory clocks were as they should. I think what happened is that the 170.24 forceware drivers overclocked my card without me knowing and caused the slowdowns (seriously WTF?) so i won't be installing that driver version anymore. It won't be a big loss since i didn't perceive any framerate improvement using the newest drivers so i am gonna go old school. I consider this matter closed so thanks everyone for the help.